Gay Marriage at SCOTUS

Several hundred supporters of gay marriage and several dozen opponents (the latter mainly religious and mainly opposed to abominations in general, single or betrothed), gathered at the Supreme Court today while it heard arguments.

The Cato Institute filed an amicus brief.  reason magazine covers it here; the DC gay news weekly Metroweekly covers it here.

Most of the crowd was aware of the arguments being advanced in some detail and felt the court will uphold gay marriage decisions of lower federal courts.  They just aren’t sure whether it will be upheld as a Constitutional right that exists that all states must recognize, or whether it will just be that all states must recognize via the “full faith and credit” clause any gay marriage from another state.

(I will be uploading photos and videos to this post throughout the afternoon.)

Here’s a lesbian couple who’ve been together 33 years:

Here’s a reporter from the conservative Media Research Center interviewing someone with the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce: 

One of many “Gay-9s” in attendance.  While they ranged from Italian greyhounds to bulldogs to muts, this rainbow ascoted poodle was the gayest of them all.

Here’s a reporter from Mother Jones interviewing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence:

A fairy was granting marriage equality wishes with a sparkly wand:

There was chanting back and forth between he pro- and anti-gay forces: 

New Yorker Jimmy LaSalvia, formerly of Log Cabin Republicans and then founder of GoProud, now an Independent, was here just to visit his former town of residence (D.C.)

Supporters of marriage equality unfurl a rainbow banner:

(Libertarian and LGBT groups may use any of these photos or videos, just give a photo credit.)

Libertarians at Supreme Court protest

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000003550879&playerType=embed

Krista Kirlew, a libertarian undergraduate at the University of Maryland, is among the protesters interviewed in this New York Times video (appears at 0:11 until about 0:24).

Cynthia Yockey and Bruce Majors on gay marriage and constitutional liberty

DOMA, Prop 8 and Bruce Majors’ guide to the arguments for and against marriage equality

by CYNTHIAYOCKEY on JUNE 26, 2013 @A Conservative Lesbian

(Click link above for whole article.)

With its decisions announced today striking down section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and its two-fer decision that effectively struck down Prop 8 because the proponents in the appeal did not have standing to object to the district court’s 2010 ruling against Prop 8, the Supreme Court today declared that lesbians and gays are almost 30 percent human and endowed by their Creator with semi-alienable rights, the exact alienability of which they will decide in the future.

The good news for conservatives in the DOMA decision is that it just made gays and lesbians a gettable constituency for opposing death taxes — the federal ones, that is, and those in the 13 states plus the District of Columbia that allow marriage equality. That’s because the lawsuit was brought by Edie Windsor over the $368,000 federal estate taxes she had to pay after the death of her wife, thanks to DOMA, which DOMA-approved widows and widowers do not owe.

I’m calling the Prop 8 decision a two-fer because it let stand the district court’s ruling against Prop 8 (read Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision here, it’s very entertaining) but also as a standing ruling — a decision on who is allowed to challenge a lower court ruling — it was a decisive smackdown that will discourage others from this tactic for a good while.

….

Over at DoubleThink Online, dear gay libertarian Bruce Majors has the best summary I’ve ever read of the major arguments for and against marriage equality. I’m very honored that he writes I am the first to make one of them (read the whole thing):

But my favorite argument in the debate, and one of the newer ones, was elaborated by blogger Cynthia Yockey (A Conservative Lesbian) just a couple of years ago. Ms. Yockey notes that some churches (synagogues, etc.), like the gay oriented Protestant Metropolitan Community Churches, perform gay marriage. So if the government defines a church sacrament, marriage, to mean only one set of churches (and their sacraments) are recognized in the law, and other churches and their sacraments are not, the government has established a church (or set of churches) as approved State churches. This is a violation of the First Amendment. Ms. Yockey concludes that gay marriage must be legally recognized because of the First Amendment clause supporting freedom of religion and prohibiting the establishment of a state church.

While I wholly agree with Ms. Yockey, and take delight both in her original argument and in the fact that I am friends with someone who has produced an original argument, I also would like to emphasize my corollary to her argument: traditional marriage (at least state establishment of traditional marriage) also violates the First Amendment.

I’m also the first person to point out that the anti-gay religions funding and driving the opposition to marriage equality are after a much bigger prize than denying equality to lesbians and gays. To wit, the anti-gay churches have as their ultimate goal grabbing from government ALL the powers over married couples, both civil and religious, in order to gain virtually absolute contrfollowers. For example, under the Catholic definition of marriage, Catholics cannot divorce. However, thanks to the government’s control of the civil rights of marriage, which levels the playing field regarding all religions, Catholics CAN divorce AND re-marry, and their church only gets to deny/stigmatize their subsequent marriage(s) but not preclude them.

Notes on a research project on the failed statist model of "civil rights"

(This post is a stub until I remove this prefatory parenthetical remark — i.e. I am coming back and fleshing it out later.  My time is being sapped by pointless property viewings caused by the civil rights laws.)

Grad students, policy analysts, and academics should do more studies on the cost of our failed civil rights paradigm and the emergent order, individualist alternatives it displaced and eliminated.

Here is what “civil rights” meant to me this month:   under DC fair housing law there are 26 protected classes, not just age, race and sex, national origin, religion and such, but source of income, sexual orientation, appearance, political affiliation and matriculation (whether and where you are in school). So having successfully rented one house to a group of American University students I am showing other groups of students as well. No one can say they won’t accept students, even if asked up front – that would be illegal. (They do now sometimes say they won’t accept co-signers (parents) or out of boundary co-signers.)  So I take them all out in 95 degrees, use up hours of my time, make them fill out elaborate applications, in one case have them fork over a $40 credit check application fee for each prospective tenant, and then they rent to someone else or even just decline to tent to 3 or 4 unrelated grad students. So the “progressive” statist model of civil rights is really working.  How many underclass urchins could I have tutored with the time the civil rights laws make me waste?  How much more money could I have made so that the allegedly minority benefiting welfare state could have been better funded by the taxes it steals?

One can easily multiply avenues of research along these lines:  how many people of color (or other protected classes) are never hired and never given a chance or a start, who would have been, because under our current civil rights regime they are too costly as employees in that they cannot be fired, demoted, reprimanded or even not promoted, because of the risk of law suits, etc.

Today’s marriage equality rally at the Supreme Court

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Today’s Gay Rights Rally at the Supreme Court

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